Guns in the Gallery

Once she’d read all The Times’s news and features, she addressed her mind to the crossword, but felt awkward doing it with someone she knew beside her. Carole Seddon was very anal about her crossword solving, and the knowledge that even as close a friend as Jude was present put her off. The fact that her neighbour was totally uninterested in the clues or her answers did not fully remove the feeling that she was under surveillance. As a result, her concentration suffered and she was slow to make the necessary verbal connections.

When they emerged from Brixton Station, Carole was surprised to find herself in what felt like just another upmarket London suburb. True, there were more dark faces on the street than she was used to, but then she did come from the backwater of Fethering, where even the convenience stores had yet to be taken over by Asians. And some of the vegetables on display outside the Brixton shops were a little more exotic than what she’d find in the local Allinstore. But otherwise, not for the first time, Carole Seddon felt slightly embarrassed by her unthinking readiness to accept stereotypical attitudes.

The address they’d found on Denzil Willoughby’s website was at the end of a street of small houses built for railway workers but now gentrified to a very desirable standard. Their destination was an old warehouse, which had also been expensively converted. Curtained windows on the upper storey suggested that a loft apartment had been carved out of the space, though whether or not Denzil Willoughby lived up there Carole and Jude didn’t know.

The warehouse had high double doors, presumably to let in wagons or heavy machinery for its original owners and life-size guns plastered with photographs for its current incumbent. Into one of these doors was set a smaller door which opened at Jude’s touch. There was no sign of a knocker or bell, so she just led the way in. Carole was happy to follow, aware that she might not have been so bold had she been on her own.

They found themselves in a space high enough to garage three or four double-decker buses. A spiral staircase led to the floor above, and two doors at the back led off perhaps to offices or other utilities. In reality the level of clutter inside the workshop was even more chaotic than it had appeared on the webcam. Carole was vaguely aware of the concept of objets trouvés, art made from everyday articles dignified with unlikely titles, but she could not for the life of her imagine how some of the detritus collected in Denzil Willoughby’s workshop would ever make it into a gallery.

Among the objects on display were a rusty tractor and an assortment of car engines. A decommissioned red telephone box with its glass replaced by kitchen foil stood next to an antiquated milking machine. A broken neon sign reading ‘Kebab’ was propped against a collection of blue plastic barrels which had contained pesticide. Three collecting boxes moulded in the shape of small blind boys with white sticks loitered in the company of some mangy cuddly toys. Two Belisha beacons leant against a wall with an assortment of golf clubs, fishing rods and ice-hockey sticks. Superannuated cigarette machines were piled up next to a set of giant plaster frogs.

Near the door were some artefacts Carole and Jude recognized – the photograph-covered gun and the framed pieces which had recently been returned from the Cornelian Gallery. They had been piled up higgledy-piggledy, almost as if the artist had lost interest in them.

In the centre of the warehouse was what appeared to be a fully functional fork-lift truck, though whether that was there to move about the other junk or destined to form part of an artwork in its own right neither Carole nor Jude could guess.

As they took in the warehouse’s bizarre contents, they realized that the space was no longer uninhabited. On the floor at one end lay a life-size painted wooden crucifix into which a shaven-headed young man was banging galvanized nails. Laid out on the floor the other end was a giant poster of President Obama over which a young woman was laying a painstaking trelliswork formed by strips of Christmas Sellotape. There was no sign of Denzil Willoughby.

Neither of what were presumably his assistants took any notice of the new arrivals, but continued with the work of realizing their master’s ‘concepts’. Carole couldn’t somehow see a direct line in what she was witnessing back to the studios of the Old Masters, where eager helpers were allowed to do limbs and draperies while the boss took over to do the clever stuff like the faces.

She cleared her throat to draw attention to their presence, but neither of the assistants looked up from their toil. Then Jude announced, ‘Good morning. We’ve taken up the invitation on the website to come and have a look at the “Artist at Work”.’

‘That’s cool,’ said the girl, her eyes still fixed one her parallel lines of Santa-decorated tape.